Online Product Design Education: Requirements for Success
How do you come up with the requirements for a product development project? Well, we can start with this user journey and say, “OK, how does this person use it, and what are their needs?” What are the needs of a person in this scenario, and what are the minimum requirements? What are the maximum bounds of what we want to create? At the very least, when it comes to this mute button scenario, we need it to be able to turn sound on and off essentially. That’s one way of looking at it. But, really what we want it to do is not communicate anything that shouldn’t be communicated and share what should be shared. So, what should and shouldn’t be shared across audio?
For example, you want to hear your grandma telling you a story about what it was like when she was growing up, but you don’t want to hear the toilet flushing. How do you distinguish, and how do you design a system that’s going to do that?
We’re looking at minimum performance in product design. Success would be that. Let’s say you want it to be easy to use. What does “easy to use” mean? Does “easy to use” mean it reads my thoughts? Does it mean it’s easy to push on and push off? Does it mean the button is big enough so that my visually impaired friend can use it? What does that mean for it to be “easy to use?”
On the other end, it also needs to be “not too complicated,” and that’s sort of combined with “easy to use.” This is the same way that you might develop financial metrics for success. Let’s say you want to hit a sales target of $6 million. That’s a very straightforward number. But, often metrics have more nuance to them. And similarly, you might have metrics for sales in terms of not just sales targets, but amounts like percentage yield or percentage of success, like how many attempts were successful, that kind of thing.
Likewise for a product design project, you want to think about not just making it work, but what are the nuances underneath making it work? Making it work better might be your overall department. But then within that, make it easy to use, not too complicated, and facilitate communication. Those might be a set of very simple requirements for a design project.
These requirements are what you go back to time and time again when you are testing your concepts and your prototypes. You’ll say, “OK, is this successful? How do I tell if this is successful? Does it meet my requirements? Is it within my requirements? Yes or no?”
The minimal requirements of success are some topics covered in our product design education courses.
